Working Papers and Chapters and Reporter Articles

The economic literature on online auctions is rapidly growing because of the enormous amount of freely available field data. Moreover, numerous innovations in auction-design features on platforms such as eBay have created excellent research opportunities. In this article, we survey the theoretical, empirical, and experimental research on bidder strategies (including the timing of bids and winner's-curse effects) and seller strategies (including reserve-price policies and the use of buy-now options) in online auctions, as well as some of the literature dealing with online-auction design (including stopping rules and multi-object pricing rules).

There is a great deal of late bidding on internet second price auctions. We show that this need not result from either common value properties of the objects being sold, or irrational behavior: late bidding can occur at equilibrium even in private value auctions. The reason is that very late bids have a positive probability of not being successfully submitted, and this opens a way for bidders to implicitly collude, and avoid bidding wars, in auctions such as those run by eBay, which have a fixed end time. A natural experiment is available because the auctions on Amazon, while operating under otherwise similar rules, do not have a fixed end time, but continue if necessary past the scheduled end time until ten minutes have passed without a bid. The strategic differences in the auction ...